Which is the best hosting service for newbies?

Are you a newbie in blogging? Are you looking for a best website hosting service? Ask our experts for their best advice.

I am planing to migrate to Wordpress from blogger for which I need a domain and hosting . I have come across many services like BlueHost, DreamHost, HostGator, InMotion Hosting, etc. I got confused from all these names . I don't know which is the best. I am not willing to spend big amount of money on my first wordpress blog as I am a newbie.So please guide me in selecting the best hosting services for newbie bloggers.

Answers

My personal preference is to go with Bluehost or Godaddy for now. These two are affordable enough for newbies. Also the support of both these companies is good enough to guide you in case of technical issues.

Bluehost despite being a brand from EIG group, is still offering quality hosting and support. More on why you should not buy from EIG at the end of comment.

First thing to clear, there is no best hosting service. Hosting service is depdendent on the network and power so the local (indian) servers often suffer with the issue of downtime in either of those. Most of the best hosting that you can get are usually offered from companies such rackspace, Amazon S3, Heroku, Softlayer and Liquidweb. All of these costs around 500$ onwards for first class level technical support and the features.

Keeping that aside, here's some of the suggestions for hosting services.

Bluehost costs 250 Rs per month for basic website plan. And Godaddy costs around 99.00/month. Both of them allow you to use script installer for installing WordPress in your account.

BigRock is native host (as in hosting service in India). It costs 79/mo for the basic hosting plan for your WordPress blog on their website.

Net4India has plans starting from 78 Rs per month but support and services for installing WordPress are horrible and makes it harder for you to use their service.

ZnetLive costs 112/month and in terms of technical specs and support they are not impressive.

If you can't afford either of these then I suggest you to just spend 500 Rs per year and buy a domain. You can then point that domain to blogger blog or even WordPress.com blog. Blogger has an option that allows you to point the domain to it's blog. In case of WordPress.com you can point the domain name too but if you can afford hosting plans listed above then it is better to go with them instead of WordPress.com's plan on their site.

Note: Before you buy hosting I would like you to do a research on a company called "Endurance International Group ". This company holds a lot of hosting brands and they are literally stripping out the support section of all the companies and using Indian or Philippines call centers to support for your hosting account. This is very painful experience when you have issues with website downtime or other technical issue etc. Most of the affected hosting brands so far are - 1. Arvixe2. Hostgator 3. A Small Orange 4. Justhost.

You can find more of such their brands on the following link: http://researchasahobby.com/full-list-eig-hosting-companies-brands/

You can read on the above link that how many customers are affected due to EIG's changes with tech specs and support. Please avoid buying hosting from companies under EIG. If by any chance you purchase hosting from them and your website ends up in some technical issues, you'd be in a stress and have hard time trying to get your issue resolved. Bluehost is the only brand that has survived so far in EIG branding.

I can suggest you to go with Godaddy hosting service which is better than all others. Their service is all the way from the US. If you would like to go with Indian hosting service then try for BigRock hosting service.

For the newbie bloggers, the sites that could be of the first choice are:

1. GoDaddy2. Trellika.com3. Arvixe India4. Net4India5. BlueHost

But as per my personal experience goes, Bluehost didn't serve us well. Every alternative week, our sites used to be down and they have a very poor customer support that never comes up with a quick solution.

Best hosting service for a newbie is the one which is reliable and low cost. Newbie will have the shortage of money, so go with a reliable and low cost. In my case, I have started with Hostgator India with a price of Rs 3298 per year and Hostgator worked pretty well for me. Their support is also good, only in few cases I have encountered with the problem and in that case, the mistake is from my side.

If you wonder which service to use then go for monthly plan and use every hosting service and then you will come to know about everyone and you can judge the best out of all.

All the hosting services that you mentioned in the question like BlueHost and Hostgator are quite similar to each other. Here are few things to consider before finalizing one:

1)There may me little difference in the price but make sure you do not compromise with features. Hosting available for cheap price but unable to handle high amount of visitors is useless. One of my friends went with an Indian hosting provider which was available for less than Rs 50 per month but he regretted it as his website was down most of the times.

2)Make sure the hosting provider allows full refund or money back guarantee. Hostgator does that.

3)Finally, you have to go with the provider that has good customer support. This can be critical in emergency situations.

I had personally used HostGator in the past and was fully satisfied with it in above three aspects.